Living with Dying: Grief, Loss, Beauty and Joy
untitled (specular #13 top), Pigment print from photogram,
20 x 16 inches, 2017
untitled (specular #13 bottom), Pigment print from photogram.
20 X 16 inches, 2017
Bill McDowell is a photographer living in Plattsburgh, NY.
Bill's photography book, Ground, with contributions by Wendell Berry and Rosanne Cash, was published by Daylight Books in 2016. Mother Jones Magazine listed Ground in their notable photography books of 2016 and Artnet named it one of the year’s top 10 art books. McDowell's monograph, Banner of Light: The Lily Dale Photographs, was published by Light Work in Contact Sheet 96, and his photographs have appeared in Art in America, Art Issues, The New Yorker, Russian Esquire, Guernica, Spot, and Exposure. Bill is a recipient of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, and has received the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer's Fellowship, the New York Foundation on the Arts Photography Fellowship, as well as artist research grants from the University of Vermont and Texas A&M- Commerce. Selected solo exhibitions include Jan Kesner Gallery, in Los Angeles, Houston Center of Photography, Robert B. Menschel Gallery at Light Work, The University of Notre Dame, Kenyon College, The Bennington Museum, and St. Lawrence University. His group shows include Harvard Art Museum, Musée d’art de Pully, Switzerland, Whitechapel Gallery, London, U.K., Dallas Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Society for Contemporary Photography, in Kansas City, and the Triennial of Photography at the Deichtorhallen Museum, Hamburg. Bill's photographs and artist books are represented in collections at Harvard University, Yale University of Art Gallery, the Harvard Art Museums, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Light Work, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Deichtorhallen Museum, Wellesley College, St. Lawrence University, and Rochester Institute of Technology. He is a professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont.
Bill McDowell
About his selections from The Memory of Grapes Bill writes:
I began The Memory of Grapes in 2015 following the death of my brother, who was a wine maker. The photographs originated as photograms and were later scanned and modified on the computer.
Standing among my brother’s grape vines I’ve often thought about how, over time, he shaped their existence. And that the grapes, like the blue heron flying overhead, return every spring. Even in his absence.